Sharing is caring

Today marks the 20 and a half day since I started working at ‘My Society’ as the Community Manager for the ‘Democratic Commons’. A concept that, as I will expand on later, is a lot about sharing. And so I thought I ought to practice what I preach and start to share what I am learning, thinking about ,who I talk to, whats working and whats not.

I came to this role with 10 years of experience in community organising/engagement in the third sector, where collaboration among groups and individuals is the cornerstone of a successful community project. Probably owing to a lack of resource and platforms (and possibly the culture) sharing what we were learning — success’, failures and data — wasn’t always a priority, and it annoyed me. Not sharing has impacts; slower innovation, duplicated efforts, and wasted time and money. Sigh.

But in this role, I find myself working in a space that is almost solely about how best to support sharing; data, code, knowledge. My mind is buzzing as I learn more about Wiki and Open Source communities and their potential to strengthen democracy.

I rounded off my week with an off-democracy topic call with Dan at ‘Just Fix’ , who have created a tool to strengthen tenants rights in New York. There is a demand for them to expand their project to other cities and they are thinking how best to do this. We spoke about out community building in both technical and non-technical circles, and how doing this could enable new cities get the most from the tool, whilst reducing the maintenance demands of JustFix…an issue I am still very much at the start of learning about in the context of the Democratic Commons.